


deliadear

by dearmaggiemay



Series: queen+cordelia [4]
Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018)
Genre: Deleted Scenes, F/F, F/M, M/M, One Shot Collection, This is just my dumping point of all the scenes that didn't make it into the fic guys
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2019-11-28 22:56:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18214787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dearmaggiemay/pseuds/dearmaggiemay
Summary: Being a woman back then wasn't that great, even less if you weren't straight, shared a flat with a rock band and were trying to become a professional actress.Alternatively: Delia tries to keep four dumbasses and herself alive while juggling dreams, odd jobs, other people's expectations, the occasional sexuality crisis and three cats. Thank God for Jer's homemade food in tupperwares.





	1. 1970: Tol™ Beans™

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in 1970, right after Freddie and Roger went to the theatre to watch Delia acting in Chapter 2. 1970 of my fic Queen+Cordelia

"Wow, you're really tall. For a girl, you know."

Those were Tim Staffell's first words to her after Freddie introduced them to each other. Delia rolled her eyes, but let it slide a few minutes later when it became obvious that he hadn't meant to tease her. Still, she was pretty tired of those words. She knew that almost 5'10'' was as tall as many men and definitely taller than most girls, she didn't need the reminder on a daily basis, thank you very much. 

Still a bit tipsy after the wine she had drunk at the theatre, Delia wrapped an arm around Freddie's shoulders and leant against him, listening as he animatedly talked to Tim and Roger about their earlier performance. She had liked it as well, even if Tim's vocals could use a bit more of practice... And even if she found the band's name to be a bit silly. Smile?

"He studies dentistry," Tim said after Delia asked about that. Roger gave him a murderous look.

"Fuck off, Tim, it was your idea!"

"Yeah,  _because you study dentistry._ "

Delia smiled when their bickering grew in volume and gently pulled on Freddie's sleeve, gesturing towards the bar.

"Wanna grab another drink?"

"Sure," Freddie made an offhanded gesture and stood on his toes, trying to see over the crowd that surrounded them."Just give me a sec..."

"What are you looking for?" 

Freddie didn't answer, smiling instead and grabbing her hand to pull her along. He moved a bit too fast for Delia's slightly inebriated state but she still hurried to follow his steps. Tipsy and in a dark, crowded pub, it was no miracle that she suddenly tripped over somebody's foot. Delia would have fallen on her face and probably dragged Freddie in her way down, because he didn't let go of her hand, but she crashed straight into someone's chest instead.

"Careful! Are you okay?" That someone was quick to grab her arms and help her recover her balance. "Oh, hi Freds."

"Brian!" Freddie happily sang his name. "This is Delia. Delia, Brian." 

Still a bit unsure on her feet, Delia looked up from Brian's chest. And up. And up,  _and up_ until she saw a pretty, slender face surrounded by a mane of dark curls that made him even taller.

"Wow, you are  _really_ tall," they said at the same time. For once Delia didn't mind the remark about her own height, and both stared at each other for a few seconds before they laughed at the same time. Well, it looked like she wasn't the only tipsy one. Freddie's amusement was visible in his eyes as he patted Brian's arm. 

"Did your band leave you behind to tidy up again, Bri? You poor thing..." He cooed. "Come on, let's get some drinks!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't mind me, I'm just writing some deleted scenes that didn't make it into the fic. I had written about how Delia met Freddie, Roger and then Deaky, so Brian was the only one left. As you can see, they pretty much bonded over being tol beans.


	2. 1971: Jer Will Mom You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in 1971, during Freddie's birthday lunch in Chapter 3. 1971 of my fic Queen+Cordelia

Jer had met Roger Taylor some years ago, when Farrokh had brought him over for lunch at her insistence. She had just wanted to meet that boy her son talked about so much, the dentistry student who apparently also shared her son's slightly dubious fashion sense. Farrokh brought the infamous Roger for lunch one Saturday of 1969 and when Jer first saw him, she thought he was a girl. But he was a boy all around, a really pretty boy with long blond hair, the bluest of eyes and clothes almost as outrageous as Farrokh's.

Bomi hadn't liked him so much, at the beginning, but he gave Roger a chance -he was a dentistry student after all, he couldn't be that bad, sparkly shoes or not- and after a few months he reluctantly came around. Jer would roll her eyes at her husband and just dote on the poor boy when he came for lunch. He was lovely, loud and outspoken yet polite to the bone, always eager to please his best friend's mother. It wasn't difficult for Jer to see that his relationship with his family wasn't that great even if he talked about his sister with love in his eyes, and so she was very willing to give that poor boy all the love he was lacking. In return, poor Roger would blush every time Jer scolded him for not eating enough while Farrokh let out an indignant " _Mooom_ " that made Kashmira laugh. He would also hug Jer, so there's that.

Brian and John (why did they call that poor boy Deaky?) came a bit later, in 1971. They were lovely in their own right and to Jer's relief their relationships with their families seemed to be better than Roger's. Even then, once Brian began carefully listening to Bomi's old tales about their people it became painfully obvious that he wasn't on the best terms with his own dad. Jer couldn't help but wonder if he and Farrokh bonded over that, so she made sure to give him two servings and a smile. "You need food to sustain that brain of yours, young man," she told him, because on top of being so tall the boy was also an astrophysicist. Where did Farrokh even find those boys?

Poor Brian would blush but eat nevertheless, while next to him John didn't have any kind of objection to his second serving and broke several minutes of silence to tell her how  _delicious_ everything was. He was a quiet one, that boy, but Jer wasn't fooled by appearances. John didn't talk that much but when he did, people _listened_. Jer had seen how he could use just a few chosen words to make the whole band stop in their tracks even before he was done talking, and that was one ability she quite appreciated.

Farrokh had never brought any girls home and although Mary changed that, Jer wasn't that hopeful. Mary was a lovely girl and her father was nice as well (it was refreshing to see parents and children having a good relationship, she thought) but Jer knew her son, even if Farrokh thought that she didn't. He might... Be attracted to Mary, he might love her even, but Jer knew that in the long run he would need something else. And God, didn't she hope to be wrong. Life would be so much easier for her son if he didn't wear those clothes or move that way, if he didn't like... At least he would have her, always, even if Jer didn't quite approve some of his proclivities.

How could she approve of something that could get her son attacked or even killed? Not to mention that even their religion forbade it, although Jer had to admit that the spiritual part of the conflict wasn't the one that concerned her the most. She didn't dare to speak to her husband about that, it's true, but it was because they belonged to other times, other generation, had other views of life. Even if Jer loved her son more than she loved her religion she wouldn't make her husband choose. She didn't dare to, because the results could be... No. At least there was also Kashmira, who wasn't that religious anyway and who also belonged to another generation, one that saw things a bit differently. 

But, once again, it wasn't religion what Jer was concerned about. How could she be scared of some intangible demons while others walked free all through London, able and willing to hurt people like Farrokh? That was she was truly worried and scared of. Religion forgave people, even people like Farrokh, but the world didn't. At least, she thought, he had gotten himself good friends. As Jer watched them come inside the house she had been relatively sure that none of those lovely boys shared her son's feelings... And then one Delia Hughes walked into her living room right after John.

She wasn't masculine in the same way that Farrokh's style was a bit feminine sometimes, but when she looked at the girl Jer had the same feeling she had had many years ago, when Farrokh had come back from the boarding school. She was subtler than her son but even so, Jer was able to see that appreciative glance in Kashmira's general direction. That was one look she had seen in a younger Roger's eyes before his brain had started working properly again, and that was the look Delia had on her face, before she frowned and Jer had to smile at the familiar  _It's his sister, it's his younger sister, abort, retreat, nope_. At least she had to admit that it was endearing how Farrokh's friends would respect his little sister, even if Roger still flirted with her from time to time. Jer had the feeling that Delia would have done the same in the same exact friendly tone if it wasn't because... Well, because of the obvious. 

At least the one of Farrokh's friends that was like him was subtle about it. Jer noticed it, of course she did, but didn't blame the girl. How could she not notice after having seen her own son? And Delia... Delia looked a bit like him, a bit too bohemian but in the wrong way (normal girls didn't dress or paint their eyes that way, wear that outrageous jewellery that would look at home in a rockstar, and don't get Jer started on those boots) and  _oh_ , she was also an actress. It was almost stereotypical, and there were also her family issues. Jer hadn't seen such a love-starved person ever in her whole life. Sure, once again Delia was subtle enough about it, but after more than twenty years giving her kids all her love, Jer knew a loveless kid once she saw her joking with her son. Because, on top of everything else, in Delia's eyes lied the remains of a pretty wild crush on Farrokh. Honestly, it was the recipe for a disaster.

But in the end, it all boiled down to two very simple facts: that poor girl reminded Jer of Farrokh, and needed a bit more of love in her life. Her smile was gorgeous once Jer insisted that she took some cookies for the way back to their flat. 

Jer had to admire them, and she really did, even if his husband didn't quite share her opinion once everybody had left, once Farrokh had announced he wanted to be Freddie Mercury (Oh, he would be Freddie Mercury, but he would never stop being Farrokh. Jer couldn't be fooled that easily). Somehow those four boys trying to become rockstars had adopted an actress along the way, and somehow the five of them were able to handle each other's issues well enough to almost look like well-adjusted, stable adults.

 _Her son always managed to attract the same people_ , Jer thought as she left the house a bit later. _A bit love-starved, a bit in love with him._ Well, she would have to do the groceries again, she guessed. After all, she had four more mouths to feed. She might buy some more tupperwares as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I call this "Jer Bulsara can and will aggressively mom every young person that finds their way into her house". Aka, Jer's POV during Freddie's birthday? Kinda. There's also that conflict between religion, real-world demons and sexuality. Let's just say she loves her son.


	3. 1972: A Steampunk Miracle ft The Deacy Amp

  _What are you doing tonight_

_You got no place to go_

_Gotta get out of the city_

_Why don't you come along with me?_

 

They were completely and utterly shitfaced, there was no other way to properly describe it. Shitfaced enough that Deaky was singing along, actually. As they clumsily made their way through the dark streets back to the flat, Delia thought that it was a pity how he would often say he couldn’t sing. Maybe he didn’t have a range like Freddie, that bitch, but he had a nice voice nevertheless!

 

_Mighty fine out tonight_

_Get your girl and hold her tight_

_We can take it nice and easy_

_You know it won't be long_

_Til we'll be, we'll be!_

 

A window being opened in a pretty harsh way put a stop to their singing.

“There are respectful, God-fearing families trying to sleep!”

Smiling, Delia and Deaky exchanged a look for about three seconds.

 

_DOOOOWN BY THE LAAZY RIVEER, COME AS YOU PLEASEEE!_

 

The man that had shouted at them groaned and closed the window, making them burst in laughter as they clung on each other for dear life. Those pink shots had been delicious but also a veery bad idea.

“Ho- Honestly, we should,” Deaky slurred, still giggling. “Shut up, I mean. They're gonna hear us and we’re gonna get robbed.”

“Nah, we won’t. We’re only two streets away. And if we do get robbed, you can just kick them. The heels of your boots are thick enough to kill a bitch.”

That was something Delia would honestly pay to watch. She was one hundred per cent sure that Deaky’s high-heeled, flower-patterned boots could also serve as a weapon.

“I don’t want to kick shit, my feet huuuurt!”

“Hush!” Delia laughed, playfully pushing him away. Deaky yelped as he lost his balance and Delia hurried to catch him when he bumped face first against a parked car. “Fuck, Deaky!! You okay?”

His only answer was a drunken giggle, what made Delia think that he was either concussed or just drunk as fuck. Probably the second, he hadn’t hit the car that hard. “Come on, you menace, keep walking. I can’t believe I handle my drinks better than you, you’re taller and also a man.”

“How terrrribly feminist of you.” Deaky’s own struggle to pronounce the word made him giggle so hard that his eyes were closed, and Delia had to quickly grab the sleeve of his shirt when he tried to cross the road.

“Look first, you muppet! You’re gonna get killed and then Freddie’s gonna kill me!” she protested, looking both ways before starting to close the street. Only one street left. Surely they could survive that, right?

The mention of Freddie had made Deaky stop laughing and open his eyes, at least, even if it was only to pout. "Shut up, he treats me like a baby.”

“Love, as far as we’re concerned you are the baby. And he does love you.”

Deaky sighed. “I know. Bitch.”

He had quite the talent to make that word sound full of affection, Delia noted. She didn’t realize she had been walking alone for a few seconds until she heard a soft bumping noise and turned around to see Deaky leaning against a dumpster for dear life, looking at the pile of trash as if it was the best thing ever. What the fuck?

“Deaks? Come on, I don’t want to get home too late, we’ll wake them…”

The next morning Brian had a meeting with his thesis supervisor, Roger an anatomy exam and Freddie a job interview (courtesy of his father, which meant he couldn’t exactly refuse). Delia would like not to wake them up in the middle of the night because she and Deaky were too drunk to walk three steps without making any noise.

“Come here for a second…” Deaky didn’t look at her when Delia didn’t answer (was she having a hallucination?) and just gesticulated like crazy. “Just one second!”

Groaning, Delia walked back to the dumpster. “What?”

“Do you see that?”

“I see a lot of shit in front of me, Deaks, you’ll have to be more specific.”

“There.”

Deaky pointed at something, a mess of wires that was balancing on the edge of a broken desk. Unimpressed, Delia raised an eyebrow. “So, wires. Don’t you have plenty of those already? Last week I found a bunch of green and yellow ones while I was cleaning under the couch.”

“Yeah, but these wires… Hold on.”

“What… Deaky, what the fuck?” Delia exclaimed, watching in disbelief how Deaky clumsily hoisted himself up on the edge of the dumper and jumped inside. Or rather let himself fall inside. How the fuck was this Delia’s life?

“These are thinner than the ones you usually find lying around!” Deaky answered, grabbing the wires and the circuit board that was attached to them and holding the whole thing up with an excited smile on his face. Damn, it looked like he was holding his firstborn. “Connection wires!”

“Well, congratulations to them! Get out of there before we need to jab you with the antithetanic!”

It took them a while, because at first Deaky absolutely refused to let go of the wires and Delia could happily live without touching all that stuff, but at the same time he was drunk enough that he couldn’t get out of the dumpster without any help. So Delia ended up holding the wires and everything, swearing under her breath while Deaky clumsily made his way out of the dumpster. He had to climb over a broken telly to achieve that, and honestly his boots were probably a fantastic weapon but weren’t helping him on that occasion.

And that was how they entered the flat fifteen minutes later; still drunk as fuck and with Deaky holding all that shit from the dumpster. Delia made sure to lock the main door and abandoned Deaky to his fate, carefully making her way through their small flat. The lights were all off except for the ones in the living room, where Delia found her friends. Brian and Freddie waved at her from the couch where they were calmly (for once) playing scrabble. On the other hand, Roger just grunted at her from his place on the floor.

“Hi Rog, how’s it going?” Delia asked, sitting on the floor with her back against the couch. She kicked off her shoes and sighed in relief, both because the heels had been hurting her feet and also because a pair of hands had come from above her and were soothingly running through her hair. She could tell it was Freddie, by the jingling of the bracelets.

“Right now I would rather sell my body to the med students than take this exam,” Roger answered without looking up from a diagram of what looked like an ugly worm. However, after many nights of Roger rambling as he studied, Delia knew it was actually an embryo. It still looked like an ugly worm nevertheless.

“Fair enough.”

Their resident drummer looked like a mess, the poor thing. He was surrounded by piles of notes and books and had his jar of teeth opened in front of him, with the teeth carefully set on the floor. The skull Delia would usually use to reenact Hamlet’s most known scene was now on top of a nearby table with a lot of post-its stuck to it, to the point that she could barely see the bones and the whole thing made the skull look like a particularly deformed, yellow Christmas tree. Next to the skull, there was a coffee pot but no mug. Maybe Roger had flung it out of the window in frustration, it wouldn’t be the first mug lost that way.

“Shouldn’t you two be sleeping already?” Delia asked the residents of the couch, as low as she could so she wouldn’t bother Roger. “You have stuff to do tomorrow.”

“Well, we were waiting to make sure you’d arrived safely… Deaky, what _the fuck_ is that?”

Freddie’s voice had gone up an octave as soon as Deaky made his appearance by the door of the living room, drunker than Delia, barefoot and smiling as he held up his dumpster treasure. The mess of wires was falling around his face and hair and the darkness outside the living room made him look like some kind of steampunk, eldritch deity.

“Brian’s new amp!”

“Do I want to know?” Brian asked from somewhere behind Delia. “Also, stratosphere. I believe I win.”

“Fuck you, Brimi.”

In front of Delia, the missing mug mystery was solved once she saw Roger sipping coffee straight out of the coffee pot. She grimaced. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”   

 

-x-

 

The next morning found their resident steampunk miracle sleeping the hungover away on the kitchen table, hugging his mess of wires for dear life. Smiling, Delia shook her head and went to the living room to take a cushion that she put under Deaky’s neck so he wouldn’t be too sore once he woke up. Then she opened the fridge to have a glass of juice but what she found made her raise an eyebrow.

“Guys? Why the fuck do we have _Prosthodontic Treatment for Edentulous Patients: Complete Dentures and Implant-supported Prostheses_ in the fridge?”

“Fuck, I was looking for that book yesterday evening!” Roger exclaimed as he rushed into the kitchen. He looked ready to go and in a hurry to do so, hair a mess and sparkly pink converse somewhat clashing with a navy blue hoodie. The Imperial College’s emblem on it meant that the hoodie was actually Brian’s, which didn’t exactly surprise Delia. The five of them were pretty communist in terms of sharing clothes. Hell, she was actually wearing one of Freddie’s shirts and Deaky’s old trousers as pyjamas.

Amused, Delia watched Roger grab the book and gulp down the juice that she had intended to drink in the first place.

“Good luck!” she wished him, grinning when she received a messy peck on the cheek. On the table, Deaky groaned and slowly opened is eyes just as Roger ran out of the kitchen like a sparkly tornado.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was pretty much the origin of the Deacy Amp, lol. Also, I'm sorry but I'm a med student sharing a dorm with a dentistry student and I Can't Stop myself from projecting on Roger. My friend does have a jar with teeth and I don't know any med student who wouldn't want to have their own skull for studying. Right now it's a bit more complicated to get one, though, at least in my country, so yeah Roger gets a skull because it kinda makes sense and because I say so.
> 
> By the way, the song that Delia and Deaky are 'singing' at the beginning is Down By The Lazy River by The Osmonds, and Deaky's boots are inspired by a fanart which was inspired by a tweet. I can't find it right now, though, but I'll link it when I find it!


End file.
